In the last months of her life, Virginia Woolf was working on a writing project to which she gave the title ‘Reading at Random’. The first of her notes for this work is dated 18 September 1940. The book was to have an historical orientation – as Woolf wrote in the first entry, ‘Keep to time sequence’. But, she added, there should be ‘No “periods”: No text book’.

In a later note she wrote:

‘Reading at Random’ bears similarities to Woolf’s work, nearly two decades earlier, on the essays which became the two volumes of The Common Reader, Woolf’s working title for which was ‘Reading’. In the first reference to what would become The Common Reader, first series, Woolf wrote in her diary (23 May 1921): ‘I’m wondering how to shape my Reading book.’ Two years later (11 May 1923), she described ‘edg[ing] in a little time every now & then at Reading. I am at the Greek chapter (in reading). Shall I read a little Greek? … Or shall I plunge into early Elizabethans, of whom I am appallingly ignorant? What happened between Chaucer & Shakespeare. I think that attracts me as a basis’. The entry is interesting in part because it suggests a more linear model of literary history than The Common Reader in fact offers, in anticipation of ‘Reading at Random’.